From handwriting to mammograms: For one Longmont-area company, it wasn't such a stretch

By Tony KindelspireLongmont Times-Call

Posted:
09/07/2013 06:52:39 PM MDT

Updated:
09/07/2013 06:53:30 PM MDT

LONGMONT -- Pattern recognition is Parascript's core technology. Understanding that, it's not such a stretch to see how the company has made a leap from doing primarily handwriting recognition to reading mammography scans.

The company recently received Food and Drug Administration approval to begin selling its AccuDetect Computer-Aided Detection system in the United States. The product has been in use in Spain, France, Germany and Austria for three years.

"That's a very standard situation in the medical field," said Alexander Filatov, Parascript's president and chief technology officer. "You take any medicine, any device, and it's much easier to get it approved in Europe than it is in the United States."

The jump to the medical field is something Parascript has been working on for several years. The company, which was founded in the late 1980s on technology first developed in the former Soviet Union, is primarily known for its handwriting recognition software, which is used by the U.S. Postal Service and businesses and governments in countries around the world.

An American businessman who traveled to Russia looking for potential investment opportunities after the collapse of the Soviet Union discovered a group of scientists who were further along in pattern recognition research than IBM and Bell Laboratories were. He teamed up with those scientists and launched what later became Parascript.

The difference in what the company does in handwriting recognition and what it is doing in medical imaging is that its medical imaging software doesn't eliminate the need for a human to do the job. It's meant to augment what radiologists already do.

"Basically our technology provides opportunity for improvement in two directions: to find more cancers that were missed by the radiologist, or to advise radiologists that there might be no cancer, no suspicious lesions, in the place where the radiologist thought he saw something," said Filatov, who has been with Parascript since its founding. He said that radiologists miss "an average of 20 percent of cancers when they look at these images." Also, a large percentage of women are recommended for follow-up screenings who don't need them.

Parascript's AccuDetect is meant to act as a "second set of eyes" for radiologists, Filatov explained.

"In certain countries that is a requirement ... that two people should independently review those images," he said. "It can be more expensive, twice as expensive, but that is where our product comes into play.

"In some countries, it's required. In the U.K. it's required, but in the U.S., it's not."

What is used in this country are other types of CAD software, said Yuri Prizemin, the company's director of business development in its medical imaging division.

"In this country, almost 80 percent of machines have computer-aided detection," he said.

But the difference in the Parascript product and other types of CAD systems, said Filatov, is similar to the reasons why Siemens, NCR, Unisys and even the Postal Service use his company's handwriting recognition technology over its competitors: It's a much more sophisticated software.

"We believe we are bringing to the market the next generation of CAD technology," Filatov said.

Parascript is in the Boulder Tech Center at Colo. Highways 52 and 119. It employs about 100 people, roughly split 50-50 between here and Moscow, where the technology was first developed.